As of January, 2012, this site is no longer being updated, due to work and health issues
Sources:
- I was intrigued by an article in the Guardian (UK) Why do we ignore 'real time' results from Google Search? Answer: "Eye-tracking shows that tweets added into search results don't get much attention".
- The example screenshot has a light green background behind the real-time part: I think that users assume it's an ad rather than organic search results.
- The original source is New real-time search eye tracking study: Search gone wild (free with registration).
Conclusion: [The test groups] quickly found the top results, taking, on average under two seconds. The time it took to find the top results remained consistent for the second set of searches. However, the real-time results proved more elusive at the onset. It took both groups, on average, over ten seconds to fixate on the real-time results—even though two of the three search terms had real-time results positioned within the top five results.- I think I got the link from Greg Sterling's article at SearchEngineLand.
Avi's Quick Evaluation
- My screenshot below has the real-time results way at the bottom, under the News results, with the label "Latest results for"
- I only found the Latest area because I was looking for it and because it scrolls the content (sometimes). The Pause link was a useful cue to find it again (I kept losing track).
- The scroll rate is unpredictable, which is a bit odd.
- The Latest area currently has no horizontal lines or or box, just the googly scroll bar at the right that's a little more than an inch tall.
- Web sources, such as news and reviews sites come up quite similar to normal search results, with smaller title font size and linking.
- Tweets are formatted with extremely subtle IM-type speech bubble.
- The poster (twitterer?) is a live link to their account, without the @ which would be a cheap usability* improvement
- Tweets with user names in the @username format are live links
- If there are any URLs in the text, they are live linked as well.
- There is no way to click on the specific visible tweet: users have to click the username and then find the particular tweet in their listing.
- You can see lots of little examples below the big screenshot
Avi Rappoport, Search Tools Consulting
page created: 2010-3-10